Page 47 - Studio International - September 1965

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avoid the geometric trap of overlapping circles. Her
shapes became less and less recognisable as 'shapes·.
At this same time dark colours began to appear with
more and more frequency. Her balls and discs of pure
colour were still there from time to time, now often all
floating in space of total black, or totally unrelated to
each other in the midst of swirling darks. Some of the
increasingly abstract canvases of this period are so
deeply sad and full of total gloom of darks as to be
almost unbearable to view.
It is hard to believe all this. looking at the new work.
It is as though Alice Baber deliberately and consciously
sank herself into all these blacks and deep deep darks
in order to learn and come back with what she needed
in her continued pursuit of and study of light. She is,

really is. after all. a colour painter. And she has now
found a way to make her darks peculiarly colour:
colour in themselves rather than values in a chiaroscuro
scale. And all of her lights. her airy jewel-like colours
have acquired new. strangely 'darker' values within
themselves as well.
First off. for myself. I must say that I think Alice Baber
is a painter with a very strong, very basic tragic sense.
I myself think she could not tolerate the triteness of
painting sorrow in the conventional way; that she
wanted more than that; that she wanted to paint
sorrow in light gay colours. as nature does. This may
sound strange, looking at all these lovely, laughing,
brilliant colours she uses. But in looking closer one can
see and feel an almost terrifying poignancy, a near­
weeping sadness and sorrow in these delicately gay
and summer-bright colours. It is as if she is trying to
tell us about her native Illinois. with its brilliant blinding
sun, its dust, its summer-deep greens. that Summer
itself will not stay, School must begin again. Grand­
mothers and oldsters will not last the Winter. One feels
a strange choking sorrow over the gay beauty she
shows us, one does not feel gay or abandoned.
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